


for the line is thinly drawn 'tween joy and sorrow

by malicegeres



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale and Crowley Through The Ages (Good Omens), Denial of Feelings, Discorporation (Good Omens), Hanahaki Disease, I'm Playing This Kind of Straight But It's a Ridiculous Concept, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Requited Love, So It's Funny But Like Naturally So
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22777114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malicegeres/pseuds/malicegeres
Summary: Aziraphale is too stubborn to admit that Crowley loves him back, so he keeps dying from Hanahaki disease.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 302





	for the line is thinly drawn 'tween joy and sorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [questionablyevil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/questionablyevil/gifts).



> Maggie wanted funny Hanahaki, so I'm giving y'all funny Hanahaki. It's not as funny as I originally planned, but I'm very happy with how it turned out.
> 
> For those who don't know, Hanahaki disease is a fanfic trope where someone who is in unrequited love pines so hard they develop a degenerative disease where flowers grow in their lungs, they cough up a bunch of petals for the #aesthetic, and then they die because they can't breathe. The only cures are either to remove the flowers, which remove their love for or their memories of the person they're in love with, or they have to find out that their love is reciprocated.
> 
> Enjoy!

_So I’ll continue to continue to pretend  
My life will never end,  
And flowers never bend with the rainfall.  
_— Simon and Garfunkel

The first time it happened was in Babel, and it was shocking.

Possibly it meant something, this happening now, but Aziraphale liked to hope that this wasn’t a part of God’s Ineffable Plan. The language thing, sure, _that_ was God’s, but this was absurd. It started as a popping feeling in his chest. It didn’t hurt, it was just strange. It wasn’t until the first pink petals made their way up his throat that he realized what was happening to him.

This was long before the Arrangement, but he and Crowley stuck together. The humans were confused and frightened, unable to communicate with friends and loved ones who weren’t from their home nations. Neither of them had a home nation, and they were as able to understand the humans around them as ever, but that in itself could be rather lonely. They’d spent time together before, under trees in Eden and over drinks in Uruk, but they’d never clung to each other as they did now.

Naturally, Crowley noticed the petals.

“Who is it?” he asked.

Aziraphale glowered at him. “That’s none of your business, my dear.”

Crowley shrugged. “Alright,” he said. “Well, good luck. At least he’s mortal, so the worst that happens is you discorporate and wait it out.”

The second time it happened was in Egypt, and it was devastating.

Crowley was at the end of his rope. He had no love for the slaving pharaoh, but the people of Egypt were not the pharaoh. Many of them had little more power than the slaves. _They_ didn’t deserve to lose their livelihoods and starve when the pharaoh would weather the plagues just fine. _They_ didn’t deserve to lose their children.

One thing that had always amazed Aziraphale about Crowley was how little anger he harbored toward Heaven. He knew it was there, he supposed, under the surface, but even when the pain of falling was fresh, Crowley had been the one to approach Aziraphale first for conversation. So it took him by surprise, the vitriol Crowley heaped onto the closest agent of Heaven he could find. It hurt, and for the first time Crowley didn’t seem to care.

That is, until Aziraphale coughed up a red petal with crimped edges.

Crowley stopped mid-sentence and stared at him. He went bare-eyed, in those days, and the Egyptians assumed he was touched by Apep and left him well enough alone. It meant Aziraphale had to watch as his pupils went from angry little slits to great, black expanses of revelation.

“It was me, in Babel, wasn’t it?” he whispered in awe. Then, slowly, he reached a hand toward Aziraphale. “I’m an idiot, angel. I’m so sorry. I—“

Aziraphale smacked his hand away. “Don’t. Don’t you dare try to tell me you reciprocate when I know you’re not capable.”

That was the crux of the problem. Crowley very much _did_ reciprocate Aziraphale’s feelings. In fact, he’d fallen for Aziraphale first and had been more or less pining after him since Eden. He didn’t exactly hide it well, either. For all he pretended to be cool, beneath his shell Crowley was nothing but soft tissue and delicate organs—and his shell wasn’t all that sturdy, either. He was more like a softshell crab than anything else, emotionally speaking.

He didn’t grow any flowers of his own, though, at least not in his lungs. It was something that could happen to any being of celestial stock who was pining badly enough, but Crowley was an optimist. Furthermore, he had eyes. Until Egypt he hadn’t been certain that Aziraphale loved him, too, but he’d always had hope.

Aziraphale, on the other hand, couldn’t afford that hope. To have hope that Crowley could love him would mean acknowledging that he and Crowley were the same, that Crowley didn’t deserve Hell any more than Aziraphale did—and perhaps that Aziraphale deserved it more, because deep, deep down, in a part of himself he’d locked away, he didn’t believe in Heaven’s inherent goodness anymore than Crowley did. But Aziraphale couldn’t let himself acknowledge that, because he was an angel. He was also a stubborn bastard, which was why he was so able to convince himself Crowley couldn’t love him that he drowned in flower petals every time they got too close.

The third time it happened, it was starting to get a little silly.

“Angel, seriously, Heaven is going to start asking questions if you keep leaving corpses stuffed with daisies everywhere you go,” said Crowley as he watched Aziraphale retch in an alley just off the Forum. “I’ve told you, it’s mutual. I reciprocate. I do, in fact, love you.”

Aziraphale looked up from the petals on the ground and glared at him. “I’ve never said it’s you.”

“Who the hell else would it be? You have very strongly and deliberately implied to my face that it’s me!”

He stood up straight and crossed his arms. “I have done no such thing.”

Crowley let out a loud grunt of frustration. “Would it really be so bad, Aziraphale? I don’t want to push this, I get what’s at stake, but it seems to be an ongoing issue for you.”

“Perhaps,” said Aziraphale, “but it’s not one to which you can be the solution.” And then, as though underlining his point, he bent over and regurgitated an entire striped carnation.

“Fine! Fine, then!” Crowley shouted. “Die, for all I care!” And with that, he stormed off.

The fourth time it happened, after the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, Crowley didn’t say anything at all. He simply stared at Aziraphale, one eyebrow fixed condescendingly in place, and let the silence speak for him. He didn’t say anything when he started coughing up bouquets of wallflowers as they sealed their Arrangement, or snowdrops when the commiserated over the fourteenth century, or hydrangeas when Crowley bit the bullet and moved from Italy to London to be closer to Aziraphale in the fifteenth.

He never asked why Aziraphale didn’t just remove the flowers. The optimistic part of him thought Aziraphale wouldn’t ever consider it, but an insecure voice in the back of his brain told him it might not be a good idea to bring it up, just in case Aziraphale decided he’d be well shot of his love for Crowley after all.

Crowley didn’t know what Aziraphale was telling Heaven had happened to his bodies. Probably something about being bested by his demonic adversary, which was, in many ways, true. In any case, Aziraphale only tended to start hacking up plant matter around him, which meant he was always around to dispose of the body.

An empty celestial corporation could be a powerful tool in the hands of the right magician, so he had to be careful. Aziraphale wound up in a lot of paupers’ graves, or cremated, or tossed in a bog in the hope that nobody would ever find him. In the seventeenth century, Crowley gave into temptation and let the Lord Chamberlain’s Men use his skull as a stage prop. Aziraphale had been rather fond of Will, he reasoned, and _Hamlet_ had been one of his favorites.

Naturally, when Aziraphale came back and found out, he was incensed. He did keep the skull, though, and for centuries after it sat on his mantle next to a morning glory he’d coughed up, pressed, and framed as a bit of a private joke.

After the Antichrist arrived on Earth, Crowley didn’t know who was going to discorporate first: Aziraphale from his petal-choked respiratory system, or Crowley from a stress-induced stroke. Neither of them could afford to die, not now, not when the whole world was at stake. But Aziraphale apparently couldn’t afford to think about his feelings, either. He needed to believe Heaven wouldn’t actually end the world if the Antichrist turned out alright, so he couldn’t admit any of the things that came with loving Crowley and being loved by him in return.

Raising the Antichrist themselves could only hasten the progress of Aziraphale’s condition, so Crowley brought in the demon Ashtoreth to be the nanny and Aziraphale recruited St. Francis (ironically) to be the Dowlings’ gardener. Outside of meetings pertaining to the Arrangement, Crowley made it crystal clear to Aziraphale that they were not to see each other, and that this was for Aziraphale’s own good, because he cared for him very deeply and didn’t want to see him discorporate before they could finish their work.

It seemed to do the trick. He’d cough up a single petal here or there on top of busses, or, to Aziraphale’s consternation, during symphonies and plays. But until their trip to Tadfield Manor his condition remained more or less stable.

It wasn’t to last.

“There’s something odd about this area,” said Aziraphale. “Can’t you feel it?”

“What?”

“Slow down a moment.”

The Bentley slowed again.

“Odd,” muttered the angel. “I keep getting these flashes of, of…”

“What? What?” said Crowley.

Aziraphale stared at him.

“Love,” he said. “Someone really _loves_ this place.”

Crowley froze, his eyes fixed to Aziraphale when they really should have been on the road. “Pardon?”

Aziraphale cleared his throat and swallowed something down. “There seems to be this great sense of—“ He put a closed hand to his mouth and coughed politely. “—love. I can’t put it any better than that.” Again he coughed, this time harder, and a cascade of spittle-coated petals fell onto Crowley’s nice leather seats.

If he hadn’t hit the woman on the bike, Crowley might have lost it. He might have screamed, pulled the car over, and kissed Aziraphale right there and then just to shut him up. And over the next few days, while Aziraphale did whatever he was doing to find the Antichrist and Crowley paced around his flat, he played the words over and over again in his head.

The stupid bastard. Now, on top of the missing Antichrist, the impending end of the world, and the threat of Hell breathing down his neck, Crowley had to worry that Aziraphale was going to choke himself to death over his very stupid, _very reciprocated_ feelings of love. His bloody-minded devotion to Heaven would eject him right back up there, and Crowley would have to face all of it alone.

He was right, in the end. He wouldn’t find out until much later just how right he was, that Aziraphale had dithered for hours coughing up gardenias until his mouth tasted like a romantic bingo night at a retirement home, torn between calling Crowley and calling Heaven. But he’d picked Heaven in the end, and it was fire that did him in, so Crowley was able to walk away from the bookshop certain that it hadn’t been his fault. He was still rather distraught about the whole thing, but you had to take your silver linings where you could get them.

After that, things got a little chaotic, and when it was quiet they had too much to discuss to notice anything had changed. It wasn’t until they were sitting side by side in the jeep, the dark Chiltern Hills rushing by to the tune of Handel’s Water Music, that they realized how unusual it was that their serenity wasn’t being punctured by any hacking coughs.

After half an hour, Crowley finally worked up the courage to say something. He cleared his throat. “Guess Adam cleared your lungs out,” he said as coolly as he could.

Aziraphale frowned. He took a deep, experimental breath. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I’m feeling much better.”

“Good. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” He laughed nervously. “It wouldn’t do to discorporate after what I just did in front of the Metatron, would it?”

“Nuh,” said Crowley. “I ssss’pose not.”

Aziraphale glanced over at him. “Are you alright, my dear?”

“D’youwannahotelroom?” he squeaked.

“Pardon?”

Crowley took a moment to compose himself. “Would you like me to get you a hotel room?” he repeated, his words careful and deliberate. “I’d offer to let you stay at my place, but I don’t want to, you know, risk making it worse again.”

Aziraphale smiled. He reached over to the steering wheel and pulled Crowley’s left hand off of it, bringing it down and holding it firmly between them. “Oh, my dear,” he said, “I don’t think it’s going to be much of a concern anymo— _Good Lord, Crowley, watch the road!_ ”

“Shit!” Crowley shouted, turning sharply to avoid hitting a tree. He stopped the car and sat there, panting. “Okay. Alright. Maybe let’s not discuss our relationship while I’m driving.”

“No,” Aziraphale agreed. “Home, my love?”

“Ngk.” He paused. “Unless you want to… I mean, we’re already stopped.”

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose with distaste. “If we’re going to do this, my dear, we’re not going to do it in the back of a car like a pair of teenaged wastrels.”

“Right,” muttered Crowley, grateful for his cold blood and Aziraphale’s lack of night and heat vision. He paused again. “Can I kiss you, at least?”

Aziraphale smiled. “What the hell?” he said, and when it became clear that his cursing had undone Crowley entirely, he closed the gap between then and met his lips eagerly.

They lingered there, Aziraphale’s hot breath filling both their mouths, skin brushing and pressing against skin, and then Crowley pulled away.

“Okay, okay,” he said, sitting stick straight against the back of his seat. “If we don’t stop now we’ll never get back to London. Let’s go home.”

For a brief moment, Aziraphale seemed to consider whether teenaged wastrels had the right idea after all, but he thought better of it and nodded.

“Home,” he repeated, and the rose blooming in his chest was only a metaphor.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me [@crowleyraejepsen](https://www.crowleyraejepsen.tumblr.com/)!


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